The man who knew too much

A major Channel 4 docu-drama starring Mark Rylance as weapons inspector Dr David Kelly is a searching portrait of an honourable man in despair - it also looks set to make the government and the BBC distinctly uncomfortable

A few weeks before Christmas I was in a beach cafe in Tangier, eavesdropping on a whispered conversation. The conversation was being rehearsed between the actors Mark Rylance and Geraldine Alexander. They were recreating a scene from the last days of the weapons inspector Dr David Kelly and, for the purposes of the drama, Morocco in late November was being asked to stand in for Cornwall in June. In the scene, Kelly and his wife, Janice, were on the run from the press after he had been named as the man who told journalist Andrew Gilligan about the 'sexing up' of the government's Iraq dossier. Kelly was looking out at the shoreline, wondering what to do. 'I'm being sacrificed as part of a diversion,' he said, halting, barely audible, recognising his fate. 'Well, I'm damned if I am going to roll over and die for them.'

Having sat through the Hutton Inquiry the previous summer, and spent a lot of time wondering exactly what kind of man David Kelly had been, I was disconcerted to see him brought so palpably to life by Rylance, who, when the camera was rolling and when it was not, inhabited the scientist's bottled-up despair, and his sudden forced lightness, with unnerving intensity. Over the course of a couple of days' filming in Tangier - which, when not being Cornwall was being Baghdad - I had seen Rylance in other, contrasting settings. There were scenes from when Kelly was working as a weapons inspector, trying to get Iraqi scientists to talk; and others of the chaos that he met when he returned to the city after the invasion, wandering hopelessly through the artfully trashed Security Services building that might once have contained the truths he sought. Watching take after take of these little dramas on a video monitor, it was as if Dr Kelly's whole life was flashing in front of you.

At the end of the day that had begun with the filming on the beach, I spoke to Mark Rylance in the bar of the hotel in which the film crew was staying. It was nearly midnight and he had been David Kelly all day, for almost 18 hours, playing a man 'right down deep in the basement of his psyche'; what he needed first was a cold beer, and a roll-up cigarette, before he could become a bit more himself.

Rylance had, he said, of course followed the Kelly story as it had unfolded, though not in any particular depth. In his last year as artistic director of the Globe Theatre, he had been involved in various protests against the war in Iraq, and had been looking vaguely for some other way to express this anger. When director Peter Kosminsky approached him to play the role in his Channel 4 film, Rylance had no hesitation.

In preparing for the part he said he read very carefully, over and over again, the testimonies of Janice Kelly and her daughter, who had given their dignified and sometimes heartbreaking evidence to Lord Hutton. The Kelly family had declined to be involved in the film but, according to Kosminsky, 'wished it well'. Rylance was clearly taking his responsibility to the character profoundly seriously. Along with the family testimonies, he was helped by the compendious research and interview process that supported Kosminsky's script. Even so, there were leaps of faith.

'I guess with suicide it must necessarily be that you are able to keep the most important things in your life very secret,' he said. 'I did talk to one close friend [of Kelly's] who said that frankly no one knew David Kelly at all. That he was very jovial company, but that he did not share much of what was in his head. This friend had no idea about Kelly's conversion to the Bah'ai faith, for example, no idea that his mother committed suicide. I think he was a scientist first and foremost, he was a workaholic, and Iraq had become his laboratory.'

That morning, and every morning during filming, Rylance had watched on video in his hotel room the footage of Kelly's appearance before the Foreign Affairs Committee, to get himself back into the role before breakfast.

'It is this horrible thing,' Rylance said. 'With the MP Andrew McKinlay calling him chaff and so on. You can in retrospect see where Kelly finds himself lying to the committee: he flinches, and it is kind of like a boxer being hit.'

Not surprisingly, given his background, Rylance was seeing some of the consequent tragedy as authentically Shakespearean, in the sense that everything, all the powers of state, came to focus on the life and death of this one individual. Further, he had come to see Kelly as a protagonist with something of a fatal flaw.

'I'm not sure he is just the totally decent one in all of this,' Rylance suggested, now fully himself, more animate than hesitant. 'There are other ways the script could have gone.' In particular he referred to a moment they had filmed back in London, a scene where Kelly sits quietly alone in a room before going in to face the FAC, having been briefed by the Ministry of Defence to stay strictly on-message. 'He must have known there was another possibility. One in which he went into the committee and told the full truth: "Yes, I did say something like that to Andrew Gilligan, and believe I was right to do so after what I witnessed," and so on. He would have lost his pension and his job had he done that. But he probably now would have been a national hero.'

Maybe, the film suggests, that failure was one of the central reasons Kelly despaired. Because he had such respect for integrity, and because he had spent a lot of years as a weapons inspector asking people in Russia and Iraq to risk everything - even death - for the truth, when it came to his turn he found he did not have the courage to speak it.

As Rylance discussed some of this, a little of the strain of the day's work was on his face and in his voice. I asked him how he coped with spending several weeks inside the head of a man so close to breaking point.

'You need to keep the engine really ticking over between takes and so on,' he said. 'You can't just run down those stairs into that darkness at will. You can't suddenly find yourself in a place that is convincingly a couple of days from suicide, or at least I can't.'

I mentioned that I had met him earlier in the day waiting for the lavatory; he'd looked through me, in character, with a weak smile.

'The thing about Dr Kelly,' he said, 'was that his sense of identity came, it seemed, entirely from work, which is very dangerous. I certainly watch that in myself, because work is not constant. Something could happen and you would not be able to do it any more, and if you have no other sense of who you are, then suicide and these things become real perils. If he was able to be conscious now and see all that has hap pened I would imagine that his worries about his pension and his job must seem rather shallow compared to being able to be around his daughters and his wife and family. I wonder if all the rest would look like ridiculous illusions.'

What Rylance appreciated most about the way that Kosminsky had put together the story was that you watched the scientist moving towards his own destruction while still vainly trying to save the world. These impulses were one and the same in a way. 'On a very personal level,' Rylance said, 'it's as if we all have these kind of weapons of self-destruction hidden inside us.'

Given this is a film about truth-telling, I wondered whether it made the actor at all uncomfortable that it was being made as a drama, in which, for example, the Prime Minister is scripted as saying things in private meetings that he expressly denied having said?

'I'm afraid,' Rylance suggested, 'that I feel there is enough general evidence in this Prime Minister's term that these kinds of questions must be asked, and that this is one powerful and justifiable way of asking them. The film acts as a witness to a decision-making process, one result of which was that tens of thousands of innocent people have been massacred in our name. I think Peter [Kosminsky] has made every effort to be as accurate as possible, but tiny deviations from the truth have to be weighed against those facts.'

Peter Kosminsky has occupied this territory before. His docu-dramas have included the powerful Shoot To Kill, based on the Stalker Inquiry, and Warriors, about British troops in Bosnia. He also made The Project, the controversial drama series about Labour's rise to power. On set in Tangier he was a methodical and fastidious presence. He was holding every detail of every scene in his head, maintaining a kind of steady state of fussiness. There were no tantrums, no dramas but those in front of the camera; he spent a lot of time in quiet conference with his leading man, and kept up a momentum through a singular determination to have everything just as he wanted it.

He started thinking about David Kelly as a film, he suggested to me later, even before his death, having watched his appearance at the Foreign Affairs Committee.

'I watched it live at the time and it was a very troubling thing to watch. I was broadly sympathetic to the BBC's position at the time,' he said, 'though I see it all in much less black and white terms now. But all of that wider politics was brushed aside as I watched it. It evoked in me a strong sense of pity for the man himself. Clearly he was a man with a strong sense of honour, and expected others to behave with this decorum. He was like a man from the Fifties suddenly being plunged into the year 2003.'

There was, Kosminsky recalled, a silent quality to him, and an analytical presence. He'd always remembered Mark Rylance in the film Angels and Insects, where he played a scientist, and had been struck on many occasions by the stillness that the actor evoked on stage and in film. He knew he would be perfect for Kelly, so he wrote the script with Rylance in his head.

The script itself, carries some of the problems of docu-drama, in that characters sometimes have to explain their positions rather than talk as human beings, but as a close account of the facts and nuances of the evidence from Hutton it could hardly be bettered. Kosminsky weighed carefully every conflicting version of events, and constructed a line through them.

'I've made a number of films of this kind,' he said. 'Sometimes I say, "This is a true story"; in this case we say, "Based on a true story". I am not saying this is 100 per cent accurate. This is a dramatic take on a set of events of which we are all to a greater or lesser extent familiar.' If he is not claiming factual accuracy, he is certainly claiming exhaustive research. He attended every day of the Hutton Inquiry, personally read every single one of the thousands of pages of documents posted, and then subsequently, with his production team, conducted over 120 of his own interviews, which did not duplicate the Hutton witnesses. They had four researchers working full time for six months on a drama that has cost £3 million.

Kosminsky comes from a straight documentary background. He was a director on Newsnight, and grew up with the idea that you tell complicated stories most effectively through the eyes of an ordinary man placed in an extraordinary situation. The Kelly tragedy seemed in this sense to him impossible to ignore. In the film he has set out to tell the life specifically in the context of what happened in Iraq in the 1990s. The interviews he conducted with friends and colleagues dwelt on Kelly's work as a weapons inspector, a part of his life that the Hutton Inquiry had neglected, partly buying into the government description, peddled in particular by Alastair Campbell, but also, cruelly, by Jack Straw that David Kelly was merely a middle-ranking official, with aspirations above his pay grade.

'In fact,' Kosminsky discovered, over and over, 'Kelly, I think it would be fair to say, was in many people's eyes, the world's number one expert on biological weaponry. He was a hugely significant figure, up for a knighthood, directly personally responsible for the discovery and dismantlement of the largest stockpile of biological weapons ever created by man, in the Soviet Union.'

Clearly the resultant film will embarrass the government - and to a lesser extent, perhaps evoke more soul-searching at the BBC - but these were not, Kosminsky argued, his only motivations.

'I think my first hope was that it would provide a fitting testament to David Kelly,' he said, carefully. 'Because in making the film I have grown to have more and more respect for him. He was not without his faults, which I think we depict, but he was ultimately a pretty decent guy who was fucked over royally by the system, and I'd like to think that, if nothing else, we are providing some proper memorial to his life. But ultimately I suppose I am also trying to look at the way we are being governed. It just so happens that in this particular case, our style of government - that news management machine that was created for Labour in Millbank in the mid-1990s and followed them into government - ended up in the death of quite an eminent individual.'

Last week in London, I watched the results of Kosminsky's work. The Government Inspector is a testament to the rigour and clarity of the director's approach. Above all, though, Mark Rylance on screen is that rarest of actors, one who can be convincingly tongue-tied, who in saying not much can speak volumes. In the film, set against the desperate fictionalising of the government, the hard-headed information management of Campbell, the pomp of Blair, the hubris of the BBC, this silence looks something like conscience. Kelly does, as Kosminsky imagined, come across like a character from a more decent time. If the film feels, as a result of Rylance's performance, like something of a final word on the Kelly affair, it also brings the whole shameful episode back into full focus. David Kelly may have felt he was being made a sacrifice to the government's failings in Iraq, may have in the end rolled over and died as if that was the only option, but he is not, in this election year, about to go away.